In Too Deep by Coert Voorhees Page B

Alvarez said. “But let’s call that hiding in plain sight.”
    “Why did you really assign me the Golden Jaguar?” I said. “It’s not like you didn’t already know everything.”
    “As I said before, if you’re going to treasure hunt on the cheap, you have to use all the tricks in your toolbox. I was hoping you might come up with something I’d missed.”
    “You said people might have noticed?” Nate said. “What people?”
    Alvarez shrugged. “I’ve been looking for the Golden Jaguar, on and off, for a while now. You meet people. Sometimes they want the same thing you do.”
    The only way I could deal with the flicker of dread about to engulf my courage was to stick to my predive routine. Wayo didn’t seem to have any antifogging drops on board, so I spit into my mask and spread the saliva around so the lens wouldn’t fog up.
    Alvarez craned his neck over the side of the boat to scan the now-charcoal water but said nothing. The motor’s whir became lower, and we slowed. Waves lapped at the boat as the engine puffed at a near idle. Wayo also leaned over the edge, steering the wheel with one hand. The upper body of his wetsuit dangled from his waist like a half-peeled banana.
    Nate tried again. “So are you going to tell us what people, or are you going to let that hang out there, all ominous?”
    “Ominous is way more interesting, don’t you think?” Alvarez chuckled and slapped his palm against the old neoprene of my wetsuit. Then he winked at me. Winked at me!
    “You’re having too much fun with this,” I said.
    “Thrill of the hunt, Annie!”
    “We are close,” Wayo called out.
    I pulled the mask over my head, now confident that the lens wouldn’t fog. I situated a waterproof headlamp just above the mask and turned it on.
    “Careful of the light,” Wayo said without looking at me, so I cupped my hand over the front and opened my fingers just a sliver.
    I imagined Gracia on the boat, smoothing down the shoulders of my wetsuit and looking at me the way my mom checked my outfits on Friday nights. “Darlin’,” I pictured her saying, the twang at full blast, “you go down there and you find yourself some treasure. ’Cause it’s the only way you can justify wearing that baggy-ass wetsuit.”
    I turned the knob at the top of my tank, and my air hoses tensed like a bodybuilder flexing his muscles. “So much at stake,” I said. I took a pull off the regulator and breathed out. “And now it’s in the hands of a fifteen-year-old girl.”
    Alvarez nodded. “There’s a reason Plan B isn’t called Plan A.”
    “Is time.” Wayo cut the engine.
    We were in position. I breathed again from the regulator and sprayed a burst of air from the octopus to check the pressure. I pushed a button on my BC, and a hiss confirmed that the vest was inflating.
    Wayo motioned for Alvarez to take over at the steering wheel, and then he came over and slid his BC onto a tank and tightened the strap.
    “What’s the profile?” I said.
    “Straight down to one hundred, then a little swim to the coral. La Garganta will take us at a diagonal down to the exit at a hundred and thirty feet—”
    “The fissure will be at around a hundred twenty,” Alvarez said over his shoulder.
    Wayo continued, “We go down, maybe ten minutes bottom time, then start to surface again, with five-minute safety stops at forty and fifteen feet, and then back to the boat.”
    I checked my gauge. Greater compression at greater depth meant that I’d use more air the deeper I went, but the 3,000 psi of air in my tank was more than enough for me to complete the dive and the safety stops required to avoid the bends.
    “Is that a light?” Josh said. “Over there?”
    Alvarez turned toward where Josh was pointing. A small light bobbed gently, coming not from the route we took but from the opposite direction, as though it had rounded toward Punta Sur from the other side of the island.
    “Did you tell anyone else?” Wayo said, the first